


Breathe

by mirlotta



Category: Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: Angst, F/M, why are my works all so angsty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:59:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5360417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirlotta/pseuds/mirlotta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I love you," I told Katrina. "Yeah. I love you. But I only love you when you're Dauntless. When you're not afraid of anything. I don't love you when you tell me you're Divergent, because that doesn't make you brave, that makes you vulnerable. That makes you weak." </p><p>This is the story of Eric as a Dauntless initiate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

I laugh, the sound rising high above the roar of the wind. It’s an animalistic noise, more a shriek than anything, but I hear the other initiates echo it down the carriage. We sound mad, crazy – and that’s probably for the best because this is mad, this is crazy, and it’s the best I’ve felt in all my life. The wind is pulling my long hair back from my face, leaving me feeling bare, exposed. Back in Erudite I would hide behind it, but that isn’t possible now. I grin, my smile so wide my cheeks ache.

“I’m going to shave my head!” I yell, my voice wild and excited. “I’m going to cut all my hair off!”

The girl standing beside me nudges me with her shoulder, her eyebrows arching in amusement. She’s transferring from Erudite, same as me, and I know her by sight if not by name.

“Someone’s excited,” says the girl, smirking. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of the train screeching against its rails, or the other initiates whooping throughout the carriage.

I smile at her, ruffling my hands through my hair for what I hope to be one of the last times.

This is mad. This is crazy. This is going to be the rest of my life.

I close my eyes, embracing the rampage around me like it’s a lullaby, or a victory chant. My sister, the same age as me, chose Erudite. She didn’t just choose faction, she chose blood – she chose to stay with our parents, and her friends, and the world that she knows. Hers is going to be a safe road. An easy road. Do I envy her?

The girl beside me shrieks, grabbing hold of my arm and shaking it. My eyes snap open, my ears attuning to the words the initiates around me are screeching.

“They’re jumping off the train! They’re jumping off!”

I hold onto the side of the carriage and lean out the door, far enough to see the Dauntless in other carriages ahead of us jumping from the train onto an opposite rooftop.

“We have to jump as well!” shouts a boy sitting on the floor behind me, wearing stark Abnegation grey.

The Candor girl sitting beside him rolls her eyes, but gets to her feet anyway, brushing the dust from her jeans. “After you, then, Stiff.”

The Stiff’s jaw tightens, and he stands up robotically. Pushing past me, he walks to the door of the carriage, his shoulders hunched forwards.

“Go on then!” urges the girl who was sitting next to him, making her way to stand behind him. The boy nods, the hem of his baggy shirt wafting in the wind. He takes a deep breath, looks down at the drop below him, and jumps.

The boy launces off the train cart, his arms drawing circles in the air as he falls towards the building. He lands on the edge, on his hands and knees. Once he’s picked himself up, he doesn’t look back – just walks away, following the other Dauntless.

Our carriage is quiet now – everyone must have stopped to watch the Stiff jump. The Candor girl who had sat next to him whistles, the sound piercing.

“Who’d have thought,” she says, her tone smeared with a grudging approval. “A Stiff, making that jump before any of us.”

No one answers her, at first – and then there’s a roaring cheer from the other side of the carriage as a boy from Candor launches into the next jump. He almost misses the rooftop, his feet dangling off the side, but he uses his arms to pull the rest of himself up. The Candor boy is shaking when he stands up, safer than any of us still on the train. To be honest, I don’t blame him – the train is at least seven stories up, the building only slightly lower.

The Erudite girl standing beside me shakes her head. “I can’t do this.”

The girl from Candor pats the Erudite on the shoulder, pursing her lips together in an attempt at a smile. “You don’t know that.” She backs away from the entrance, her path clear for a run up. “Just copy me.”

She jumps, landing confidently on the rooftop opposite us and waves.

The Erudite girl laughs nervously, and I’m reminded of just how elated I felt – how we all felt – only a couple of moments ago, before anyone started jumping.

“You’ll be fine,” I tell the girl from the faction I once called home. I could never be Candor, I realise, because at the moment, the girl looks to me like she’ll be anything but fine.

She nods. “Yeah. Yeah.”

She grits her teeth, and I wait for her as she steels herself, even as other initiates hurl themselves out of the carriage all around us. I look at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Ready?”

She swallows before nodding her head; her lips are so taut it seems like they’ll stretch all the way off her face. “Uh-huh,” she says slowly, “I’m ready. Just…” She pauses, looking at me. “If, you know, I die right now – which has probably around a fifty percent chance of happening, because this is really, really impractical…” The girl fiddles with a loose lock of her hair that’s escaped her ponytail, her voice trailing off.

“What?” I ask impatiently, beginning to worry that we’ll miss the rooftop. If we miss the rooftop, it’s not hard to figure out that we’ll be instantly factionless.

“My name,” says the girl, taking a deep breath. The carriage is almost empty now – it’s just the two of us and a couple of crying Amity kids. “It’s Katrina.”

It’s a typical Erudite name – nice enough, not too outlandish. I don’t have time to reply with anything but a “Come on, we have to jump now!” though. If we wait around much longer, there won’t be any rooftop left for us to jump onto.

I take Katrina’s hand in my own, and we make the jump together. My legs flail as I strain to touch the roof top, Katrina’s grip on my hand loosening as we fly through the air. When we land, our bodies flying into the surface of the roof like flies against a windshield, I do not waste much time over relief.

I stand up first, then Katrina, both of us flicking the dirt from our clothes with the stone-cold vanity that comes with growing up in Erudite. She might have been close to crying just seconds ago, but it is her upbringing that paints a hostile expression on her face now that she has made the jump. I admire that – how quickly the Erudite move on.

It just wasn’t enough to keep me in their faction.

"Eric," I tell Katrina, trying not to sound as out of breath as I feel. They don't do that much running in Erudite. "My name's Eric."

After that, we don’t speak as we run after the other initiates. We do not look behind us at the faces of those who aren’t going to make the jump. We are Dauntless. We are merciless.

We are no longer afraid.


	2. Chapter Two

2\. Chapter Two

 

I’m lying on my bed with my eyes shut, but I’m not asleep. I’m thinking. It seems to me that, unlike in Erudite, you don’t get a lot of time to think in Dauntless. It’s more impulsive, here. Things are left to chance. At the moment, I’m not sure whether I like that or not.

There’s only me and the seven other transfer initiates in the dormitory, but it seems a lot more crowded. Maybe it’s just all our stifled excitement or blasé anticipation clogging up the room. Along with me and Katrina, the transfers are two other Erudites, three Candors, and the one Abnegation boy who jumped onto the rooftop first. We’re not going to see the Dauntless born initiates until the last stages of training.

According to the man who introduced himself on the rooftop as our training instructor, Amar, we’re going to be tested and ranked – and only the ten best initiates are actually going to make it into Dauntless. The rest will become Factionless. I could be Factionless - homeless - in a matter of days from now.

It’s not a happy thought, and I do my best to push it aside.

If I hadn’t spent the entire day with the other transfers, I would barely be able to tell who’s from which faction. We’ve changed into clothes made from sleek Dauntless black, the kind of material that hugs the body. Still, the remains of our old factions still cling to us like skins we can’t quite shed.

I open my eyes lazily, peering around the room. The Stiff sits silently in the corner of our dormitory, his features tight against his skin. No one’s approached him all evening, and it’s not hard to figure out why. He looks about as agreeable as a bed of nails.

I smile, my lip curling. Now that I know that it’s going to be a competition to stay in the faction, I want to establish myself as the one in charge, the one people won’t want to beat for fear of what I’ll do to them afterwards. It’s the clever thing to do. The Erudite thing to do, a voice at the back of my head taunts.

Sitting up on the bed, I throw the covers away from my legs. “Oy! Stiff!”

The Abnegation boy looks up, glaring at me before turning his head away.

“Hey!” I say, standing up and walking towards the Stiff. “Stiff! Are you deaf or something?”

This time the Stiff makes no response at all, just carries on focusing over-intently on the floor. The dormitory is quiet – the Candor kids have stopped debating loudly about nothing in particular, and now watch us instead. I take a deep breath – what I’m doing now is my first impression on most of them. I have to make it count.

The Stiff tenses as I take another step towards him. In a split-second decision I lash out at his chest, pushing him backwards. He gasps, a tiny intake of breath that’s just loud enough for the others to hear him.

“Are there any other Stiffs in the room?” I ask the Abnegation boy, gesturing in mock-exaggeration. “Did you think I was talking to someone else?” I shove him again, laughing at the sense of power that surges through me. “Huh?”

I lean down, bringing my face close to his. “So,” I say, spitting the words out. “Do you have a name, Stiff? Are you Abnegation even allowed to have names, or is it classed as too damn selfish?”

Somewhere behind me, I hear one of the Candor boys laugh. The noise lifts me up, hands me my very own pedestal to stand on – I feel unbeatable, the sound of approval from the other transfers like the one thing I never knew but always needed. Back in Erudite, I was never popular – to be popular, you had to be intelligent enough to reel off popular’s twenty different synonyms. I mean, yeah, I suppose I was clever enough, but I was never one of the know-it-alls who could outsmart the teachers from their seventh birthday onwards.

In Dauntless, things could be different. I could be popular. I could be the best – I know I could. Some people aren’t brave enough to even transfer in the first place, but I have a whole lot of courage left to spare.

In a swift, easy movement that looks much more practiced than it probably is, the Stiff knocks me aside, standing up so that we’re face to face. He looks at me, his blue eyes blazing, the light making them appear almost black.

“Everyone knows the Erudite are jerks,” says the Stiff, his voice level, “but I always blamed it on bad parenting.” He looks at me, jaw set, voice level. Challenging me. “Funny. Even without your parents here, you’re still a pretentious bastard.”

His words catch me off guard, my eyes widening in shock. He tilts his head, mocking me, and – with nothing else to do - I spit at him before I walk away. The Stiff laughs.

I go back to sit on my bed, ignoring the others, but it’s hard not to notice that the atmosphere in the dormitory has changed. At the moment, I don’t know whose favour the shift is in. It’s unsettling.

I scowl.

“Someone switch the light off,” I snap, clambering under my duvet like a child afraid of the dark. “I want to get some sleep.”

 

\---

 

My sister stands facing me in the middle of her bedroom. She’s soundproofed the room by balling up jumpers and shoving them under the gap in the door – she’s clever like that.

I’m young, only about eleven. She’s nearer sixteen – older, and wiser, and better. Her Choosing Ceremony is soon, and everyone knows she’ll stay here, in Erudite. Daddy says that her talent is so rare, one day she could be the faction’s leader.

“Will you tell me now?” I ask her, bouncing on her bed in anticipation. My voice is thin and reedy, not yet broken, and next to Harriet I seem equally as frail. Her presence seems to take up the entire room, leaving me squashed into whatever tiny space remains, like a starved bird snapping up crumbs.

Harriet smiles at me, her features softening. In class we’re learning the give-aways of body language, and I notice that, though she is grinning, her eyes are solemn like she has bad news. She bends down so I can’t see her face, smoothing out her sheets where I ruffled them.

“What is it?” I say nervously, my ignorance endearing. “Are you upset? Have I done something wrong?”

“Eric,” says my sister, softly. “In four weeks’ time, I am going to die.”

 

\---

 

When I wake up I am sweating, and it takes a moment before I realise where I am.

“Sweet dreams?” asks a voice sarcastically, and I whip my gaze wildly around the room before it settles on Katrina, sitting up in the bed next to mine.

I chuckle nervously, raking my hands through my hair. “Something like that.”

“I thought you were going to fall out of bed. You were thrashing about like you thought someone was going to murder you. You woke me up.” She pauses, looking at me curiously. “So what were you dreaming about?”

“Nothing,” I lie, averting my eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

Katrina looks at me critically, even as her face droops with exhaustion. “You do remember,” she says, quietly. “I can tell.”

I do not reply.


End file.
